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Overview

This page was created to support a talk given at the Gerrards Cross
Computer Club. The topic was "Improving Windows Performance".

There are many areas where performance can deteriorate.
Diagnosing the reason is never easy and can take experience and usually
a lot of time and effort. Somtimes it is easier to reinstall - this is
when the diagnosis would take longer than the time taken to resotore
the computer to a working state.

The time take to reinstate the computer depends on how good
your backups you have are (you have taken a backup haven't you? - more
on this topic next month).

There a number of tools which can be used to investigate
issues with Windows. Note that these have been tested on XP but not all
have been tested on Vista.

Tools that work

The recommended tools are listed in the following table. They
are all free. If anyone can suggest any more then please let me know
and I will update this page. If there are any brave (foolhardy :-) )
Vista uses that can remove some of the question marks again please let
me know. Most of them should work.

This program will defragment the Page file (and some other
system files) that JKDefrag is unable to defragment as the files are in
use. It requires a reboot and the defragmentation takes place during
the reboot.

This program allows you to examine what programs are run
during the boot process. More than that it allows you to stop programs
being loaded and reinstate them. It makes a Registry tweak that is
reveOne of thOne of the Sysinternals programs, now owned by Microsofte Sysinternals programs, now owned by Microsoftrsable.

This program shows what is actually running on your computer.
You have used Task Manager (ALT+CTRL+DEL) I presume. When you run
What's Running you realise that Task Mnager only shows part (a small
part) of the story.

Other steps you can take

Remove Windows temporary files

This won't directly improve performance unless your disk has filled
up with such files and become fragmented. They accumulate over a period
of time and many of them are never deleted!

Remove Internet temporary files

These are held in a different place to windows temporary files. The
size of this store is limited by Internet Explorer but (in my opinion)
the default size of 50 megabytes is far too high. I change it to the
minimum which is 8 megabytes. This applies to IE7. IE 6 would allow you
to set this lower.

Firefox does have a mechanism for controlling the cache size but I am not a regular user.

The purpose of these files is to hold a local copy of pages you have
visited to make returning to them faster. There is a trade off between
the number of files held, the speed of your Internet connection, and
the time it takes to check the cache each time you access a link on a
page.

My own experimentation shows no noticeable speed improvement with
cache size greater than 2 megabytes so I make it as small as possible
(thank you Mr Gates for constraining my choice!)

Remove unused fonts

I have not yet tried this but it has been reported that removing
fonts can make a significant different. I think they breed in the
computer and I don't know where many of them came from!